How can we truly conceptualize air, an invisible mixture of gases that is at once nothing and everything? In his essay, “On the Poetics and Mathematics of Air,” transdisciplinary artist and scholar Andrew S. Yang reflects on both the intangible and physical characteristics of the air that makes up Earth’s atmosphere. “Air is at once distantly external and intimately internal — an extended vault of atmosphere above us and just as equally a quiet sigh within us,” Yang writes. Through words and numbers, Yang attempts to take a true measure of the air that surrounds and sustains us and what it means for our world when it is polluted. 

Andrew S. Yang works across the visual arts and natural sciences to explore our ecological entanglements at a time of profound planetary change. He received his B.S. in Chemistry/Molecular Biology from Juniata College, an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from the Lesley University College of Art and Design, and a Ph.D. in Biology from Duke University. His projects have been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. His research and writing can be found in publications such as Leonardo, Art Journal, Biological Theory and Current Biology.

The essay, “On the Poetics and Mathematics of Air,” is an excerpt from volume two, “Air,” of the five-volume anthology series “Elementals.” From the Center for Humans & Nature, publisher of the award-winning anthology series “Kinship,” “Elementals” brings together essays, poetry, and stories that illuminate the dynamic relationships between people and place, human and nonhuman life, mind and the material world, and the living energies that make all life possible. Inspired by the four material elements, the “Elementals” series asks: What can the vital forces of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire teach us about being human in a more-than-human world?

On the Poetics and Mathematics of Air

Air is equivocal. It quavers between the significantly ethereal and elusively substantial. Air is really there, but not really there—it is physical but more or less intangible. When air is recognized as something, it is almost always as a medium in which other things happen like clouds, pollen, contagion, or music. Consider Bashō—

Spring air— 
woven moon 
and plum scent¹

The air is the aroma that it carries forth and the moon that it suspends like a bright round button. The air is an invisible vehicle and substrate.

This past summer, the air stung. Doing yard work outdoors made me hoarse; I coughed a little, then coughed more. The noon sky was dusky and the sun oddly orange, akin to a persimmon on a gray blanket. Micron-sized soot was traveling by air across thousands of miles, coming from the wildfires that seared Canadian forests in conflagration. Consider Issa—

forming the year’s 
first sky…
tea smoke²

He reminds us that fire does more than inhabit air—and in fact builds it. The air’s oxygen feeds the flames, and those flames transform black spruce and fir into hundreds of millions of tons of carbon that remake an ever-hotter atmosphere.

•••

It is graduation day at Harvard University, and students in caps and gowns walk with aplomb. A person stops a few of them and hands each a seed:

Interviewer: Hold on to that for a second. Imagine that I planted that in the ground and a tree grew. And here is a piece of that tree [the graduate is then handed a heavy log]. Now, where did all that stuff come from?

The graduates offer a variety of answers—water, soil, minerals, and nutrients from the ground.

Interviewer: Now, what would you say to someone who said to you that most of the weight of a tree came from the carbon dioxide in the air?

Graduate A: I would say I have no idea, I would have to think about that.

Graduate B: I would say that is very disturbing, and wonder how that could happen.

Graduate A: That would be hard to believe because carbon dioxide is, well, it’s a gas, and it doesn’t seem intuitive that you can take on mass by taking in a gas.

“It is a very strange idea,” reflects the narrator, “that somehow the air which they view as nothing, as weightless, as insubstantial somehow makes a tree, a giant tree, that weighs several tons.”³

Every breath these graduates exhaled was carbon dioxide, from which the Canadian spruce and fir grew their big, flammable bodies. This is a puzzle for aesthetics—how to conjure sensation and comprehensibility from an invisible that is everywhere. The air is heavy with our aspirations, but more and more it feels like we are earthlings without an Earth. How can the intangible everything become more than nothing?

•••

There is no air without Earth. The Cambridge and the Oxford dictionaries converge on almost identical definitions of air: the mixture of gases that surrounds the earth and that we breathe.⁵ But in capturing air as both a geophysical phenomenon (that we recognize as sky or space) and an embodied engagement (that we experience as breath), a duality emerges. Air is at once distantly external and intimately internal—an extended vault of atmosphere above us and just as equally a quiet sigh within us. It isn’t obvious how to make sense of the Janus-faced disjunct of an air that is here and there but somehow nowhere in between.

Add to this the fact that at this moment you are likely inhaling a molecule of Walt Whitman’s last breath, taken on March 26, 1892, in Camden, New Jersey. It is as preposterous and unnerving as it is true.⁶ Poetry can have that quality, as can physics; there is a seductive wonder in sharing the smoke of Whitman’s own breath across a century, just as there is a sublimity to one among his last 25 sextillion molecules of respiration circulating in the troposphere for generations, only to enter your body right now.⁷

It feels impossible to make full sense of Whitman’s physical breath becoming our own, just as we are unable to properly reckon the continuum of the air teeming between the edge of outer space and our nostrils (much less the innumerable bubbles roiling in the oceans or trapped miles deep in Antarctic ice). One might think of air as a hyperobject—something that the literary scholar Timothy Morton has proposed to describe entities that are “massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity” and evade direct sensation.⁸ However, if we take the earthliness of air seriously—how it is held tight to the planet by its gravity, disappearing at an altitude of some one hundred kilometers—it turns out to be quite local, the thin skin of a blue marble.⁹

Air may be less a hyperobject and more a basis for what Immanuel Kant called the mathematical sublime. The sublime emerges when nature’s raw power and scale exceed comprehension by our senses or our imagination. The mathematical sublime, in contrast, is generated through our intellectual abilities, which, through math and measurement, can tame overwhelming magnitudes by representing them numerically.¹⁰ In this way, our “super-sensible faculty” of reason can subdue the fathomless and unify phenomena that appear to be in disparate contradiction otherwise. The false dichotomy of sky and breath can dissolve into a seamless atmosphere, while 25 sextillion molecules of air transfigure from an insensible plentitude into a conceivable magnitude. We can even conclude that there are more molecules of air in a single breath than breaths of air held within Earth’s atmosphere. What is both exceedingly small and extremely numerous becomes comprehensible, and maybe even more bewildering in that sublimity.¹¹

The false dichotomy of sky and breath can dissolve into a seamless atmosphere, while 25 sextillion molecules of air transfigure from an insensible plentitude into a conceivable magnitude.

Consider how for every million molecules of air in the atmosphere right now, only 416 of them are carbon dioxide—in scientific parlance, 416 parts per million (ppm). This minute and closely monitored quantity is a measure of our climate past and future, its continuous increase over the past 250 years a consequence of our unremitting combustion of wood, coal, and oil. If we can conjure calculations to represent any magnitude that nature has to offer, then the pleasure of the mathematical sublime arises from subduing the insensible vastness of scale through reason, creating domesticated versions of unruly realities. As a consequence, parts per million has become the underwhelming currency of potential climate catastrophe, a minuscule measurement that highlights the enormous potency of carbon dioxide in one sense while diminishing it in another.

Whether it is viral pandemics or dark matter or global warming, we wrestle with the paradox that phenomenal immensities are generated by the diffuse, diminutive, and often imperceptible. Perhaps 416 parts per million represents a kind of enigmatic sublime, as persistently unassuming as it is profound. Our aesthetics struggle, understandings wobble.

We do so much with an air of unknowing. The atmosphere is not a perfume, but neither is it arithmetic. What is left but to try to catch our breath?

notes
1. Lucien Stryk, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), 31.
2. David G. Lanoue, “Haiku of Kobayashi Issa,” http://haikuguy.com/issa/search.php.
3. Annenberg Learner, “Lessons from Thin Air,” 1997, https://www.learner.org/series/minds-of-our-own/2-lessons-from-thin-air/.
4. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ” (1892 version), Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version.
5. Cambridge Dictionary Online, s.v. “air,” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/air.
6. The calculation and conclusion are based on a classic physics example often called Caesar’s last breath. It is an example of a Fermi problem, named after the physicist Enrico Fermi, who frequently used mathematics to quickly estimate complex questions. The physical principles and calculations just as easily apply to Walt Whitman or any number of people, and not just last breaths. An explanation of the calculation can be found here: “Only a Breath Away aka ‘Caesar’s Last Breath,’” A View from the Back of the Envelope (blog), http://www.vendian.org/envelope/dir2/ breath.html.
7. James Lloyd, “Are We Really Breathing Caesar’s Last Breath?” BBC Science Focus, July 12, 2017, https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/are-we-really-breathing-caesars-last-breath.
8. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 130.
9. “The blue marble” refers to a photograph of Earth that was taken on December 7, 1972, twenty-one thousand miles from the surface, by the crew of Apollo 17 on their mission to the moon. In it, Earth is photographed in its totality, “floating” in the darkness of space and offering a profound sense of locality to the Earth and everything upon it.
10. Kant describes the mathematical sublime starting off as “a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude,” which then turns into a sense of sublime satisfaction that “awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us.” See James Creed Meredith, Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 33; and Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 134.
11. Kant argued that “the sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small” and thus “absolutely great.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), 87. The absolutely great is most often thought of in terms of three-dimensional size; however, we should consider size as a matter of abundance as well, since the key for the mathematical sublime would appear to be the estimation of any magnitude that is otherwise insensible to our aesthetic capacities, be that large, small, or numerous.

This essay by Andrew S. Yang has been reprinted with permission from “Air,” volume two of the five-volume anthology “Elementals,” published by the Center for Humans and Nature, 2024.